From the Pages of Labor History

For May Day, Remembering Vincent St. John

by Bob Mattingly

Not far from where I live is a cemetery that I visit on May Day. I go
there to place some flowers, red of course, alongside the marker that identifies
a grave as the final resting place of Vincent St. John (1876–1929), once a General Secretary of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a rugged union
whose militant influence still lingers in the American labor movement, awaiting
its time to flare up once more, though certainly in a new form.

It was only a few years ago that I read that some “Bay Area labor
history buffs” recently had put the gravestone in place. For most of my life
then, the “Saint”, as he was called when he headed the revolutionary
industrial union, had occupied an unmarked grave beneath the sod of a slightly
sloping rise in a pleasantly landscaped graveyard, not far from Oakland’s busy
streets.

Vincent St. John isn’t remembered as often as Mother Jones, Big Bill
Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, and Lucy Parsons, widow of one of the Haymarket
victims, but they all knew each other on a first name basis and shared a
profound vision of humankind’s eventual liberation from ignorance, poverty,
and war. But none of them believed that progress could be won without a fight.

Not yet thirty years old, St. John was elected president of a Western
Federation of Miners (WFM) local union and led bitter strikes in Colorado. In
1905, St. John help to organize the IWW and the next year was elected to
represent the WFM on the IWW’s general executive board. During his years as
General Secretary of the IWW (1909–1915), the organization made front-page news
as its organizers led some hugely popular strikes (popular with workers, that
is) such as the Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike of 1912 supported by nearly
30,000 textile workers.

It’s been said that the IWW restored Americans’ First Amendment
rights to assemble peacefully and address public gatherings as it fought time
and again against free speech restrictions. St. John was dead by the time of the
great 1930s industrial organizing victories, but it was the Wobblies (as IWW
members were called) who pioneered many of the tactics that were so important in
the 1930s organizing struggles, such as sit-in strikes and roving pickets.

I read that the Saint’s family was too poor to pay for a headstone.
Still, it’s not clear why the Saint’s grave remained unmarked for so long,
especially in a region with a distinct radical labor past. In 1946, at least
100,000 workers hit the bricks in a general strike provoked by attempted union
busting. Earlier, in 1934, there was the “Big Strike” of San Francisco’s
longshore workers headed by Harry Bridges. And, of course, Oakland is the
hometown of Jack London, the famed author of The Iron Heel, and my
favorite, The Apostate.

I’ve joked to myself that perhaps the Bay Area’s radicals took too
literally the dictum, “Don’t mourn, organize!’ That battle cry, often
repeated still today, was given the world’s workers by one of the Saint’s
fellow Wobblies, Joe Hill, who in 1915 was legally murdered by a Utah firing
squad. Hill’s ashes were divided into small packets and sent to many countries
where they were scattered by fellow workers on May Day, 1916.

Truth to tell, I wouldn’t have given the press account about St.
John’s marker more than a passing notice, if years before I hadn’t read a
short commentary on the IWW by James P. Cannon, a one-time Wobbly himself, but
mostly remembered as a founder of the Communist Party in the U.S., a leading
founder of American Trotskyism, and a Smith Act victim who, as did many Wobblies
before and after him, paid the price for his dedication to the workers’
movement in a federal prison.

What I remember about Cannon’s remarks was his affectionate appraisal
of St. John, unusually personal I thought. Cannon was a native of Kansas, raised
in a family that backed the Knights of Labor, then the Populists, and finally
the Socialists. So it was that on the seemingly boundless American prairie the
youthful Cannon found inspiring aims and goals that lasted him a lifetime.
Cannon not only was imbued with socialist fervor, he also came by a lifetime
admiration and respect for working class fighters. I don’t remember where I
read it, but I recall Cannon’s admiration for a bunch of IWW loggers. They
were Wobblies for sure, and most of them had seen the inside of jail cells, he
said. Naturally then, they were Cannon’s kind of people — on both counts.

Cannon’s respect and admiration for the Saint was well developed before
St. John’s arrest during the World War I roundup of radicalized workers and
activists by the administration of the Democratic Party’s Woodrow Wilson, who
proclaimed that “the world must be made safe for Democracy,” even as cell
doors closed behind his working class political opponents. St. John was sent to
Leavenworth for several years, obviously a frame-up, since he had left the IWW
two years before and was trying his hand at mining and prospecting in Arizona
and New Mexico.

Eventually, he wound up in San Francisco, poor in health and in the
pocket. If he died in San Francisco, it’s not clear why he was buried in an
unmarked grave in Oakland, then a ferry ride away. Nor is it clear why he
wasn’t buried in a pauper’s plot, but was buried in a cemetery that
reportedly “is famous as the final resting place of millionaires like Charles
Crocker, Henry J. Kaiser, and ‘Borax’ Smith.” What the press account left
out is more interesting, by far. The cemetery land that once had an unobstructed
view of the bay was part of a Mexican Land Grant and earlier, for 2000 years,
had been the homeland of tribes that feasted on the bay’s shellfish, and
bested the bay’s bone-chilling fogs inside Temescals, or sweat lodges.

As I say, on May Day I’ll visit the Saint’s grave.

Further Reading:

“IWW: The Great Anticipation,” by James P. Cannon, in First
Ten Years of American Communism (New York: Pathfinder, 1973), pp. 277–310.

We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial
Workers of the World by Melvyn Dubofsky (New York: Quadrangle, 1969). (See
esp. pp. 142–144 on St. John’s life.)